Tonya Bartell

• Michigan State University

From the Archives highlights articles from NCTM’s legacy journals, previously discussed during MTLT Teacher Talk.

Early childhood mathematics instruction is child-centered and play-based, supporting children to learn foundational mathematical concepts like counting, quantity, and pattern through hands-on experiences. Recent work in ethnic studies and social justice shows that young children are keenly aware of their own identities, empathic, and ready to take...

The Access, Allies, and Agency in Mathematical Systems project team designed a professional development for mathematics teachers positioning equity at the systemic level and activities aimed at supporting mathematics teachers in considering the influence of privilege and oppression on mathematics teaching and learning (Scroggins, 2017). Here, we ex...

Recent international studies have found that teachers’ attitudes, biased against historically marginalized groups, predict lower student achievement in mathematics (e.g., van den Bergh et al., 2010). It is not clear, however, if or how teachers’ racial attitudes affect their evaluation of students’ mathematical thinking to produce these effects. Us...

This is one of many practices to support teachers in assessing students’ mathematical thinking and better understanding students’ lived experiences that they can then draw on in mathematics instruction. This article highlights four examples of teachers’ efforts to reimagine homework for K–2 students.

This chapter highlights decisions mathematics teacher educators might make as they prepare to use the Teachers Empowered to Advance Change in Mathematics (TEACH Math) modules in their own courses. These modules are designed to support prospective teachers in integrating a focus on children’s mathematical thinking and their community and family-base...

The role of language in mathematics teaching and learning is increasingly highlighted by standards and reform movements in the US. However, little is known about teachers’, and especially early career teachers’ (ECTs) practices and understandings related to language in mathematics instruction. This multiple case study explored the language-related...

Tonya G. Bartell, ed. 2018. Towards Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing) 341 pp. ISBN 978-3319929064. This brief interview with Tonya Bartell introduces Towards Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education to the Numeracy audience. The interviewers also discuss with Tonya connect...

This book builds on the Teachers Empowered to Advance Change in Mathematics (TEACH Math) project, which was an initiative that sought to develop a new generation of preK-8 mathematics teachers to connect mathematics, children’s mathematical thinking, and community and family knowledge in mathematics instruction – or what we have come to call childr...

We consider how prospective elementary teachers think about multiple mathematical knowledge bases as they consider adapting existing mathematics curriculum materials to meet the needs of culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse students. Multiple mathematical knowledge bases include both children’s mathematical thinking and the cul...

Elementary mathematics curriculum materials can serve as a lever for instructional change. In this paper, we promote a particular kind of instructional change: supporting teachers in learning to integrate children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases (MMKB), including children’s mathematical thinking and children’s home and community-based mathe...

This critical volume responds to the enduring challenge in mathematics education of addressing the needs of marginalized students in school mathematics, and stems from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the North American Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA). This timely analysis brings greater clarity and support to such challenges by...

Providing students with choice can be a powerful means of supporting student engagement. However, not all choice opportunities lead to improved student engagement. Teachers can increase the likelihood that students will value choice by analyzing how students associate feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with the choice provided them....

Research advances in teaching, learning, curriculum, and assessment have not changed the continued underperformance of marginalized students in mathematics education. Culturally responsive teaching is a means of addressing the needs of these students. It is sometimes challenging, however, to convince secondary mathematics teachers about the importa...

This department publishes brief news articles, announcements, and guest editorials on current mathematics education issues that stimulate the interest of TCM readers and cause them to think about an issue or consider a specific viewpoint about some aspect of mathematics education.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) do not make any promises about the teaching practices that should be used to support students' enactment of the standards. Thus, equity gets framed as achievable through making the standards a goal for all students. We know from research on past reform efforts that standards without explicit (...

In this article, the authors explore prospective elementary teachers' engagement with and reflection on activities they conducted to learn about a single child from their practicum classroom. Through these activities, prospective teachers learned about their child's mathematical thinking and the interests, competencies, and resources she or he brou...

Make these small adjustments to your syllabus and watch spaces open to connect to children's multiple mathematical knowledge bases.

As part of a larger research project aimed at transforming preK-8 mathematics teacher preparation, the purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which prospective teachers notice children’s competencies related to children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s community, cultural, and linguistic funds of knowledge or what we refer to as...

Mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) designed and studied a video analysis activity intended to support prospective teachers (PSTs) in learning to notice equitable instructional practices. PSTs from 4 sites (N = 73) engaged in the activity 4 to 5 times during the semester, using a set of 4 “lenses” to analyze teaching and learning as shown in video...

Teacher educators need an awareness of orientations that prospective teachers (PSTs) hold about children's families and communities, so that they can support PSTs in developing positive perspectives and addressing deficit perspectives. Orientations expressed by 20 PSTs while in preK-8 mathematics methods courses are examined. Results from interview...

In this essay, the authors provide a rationale for the need to break the silence of privilege and oppression in mathematics education. They begin by providing a brief rationale from their personal and professional perspectives, which includes background about planning and executing the Privilege and Oppression in the Mathematics Preparation of Math...

In this essay, the authors begin to “unpack the invisible knapsack” of mathematics education research privilege. They present short statements representing the multiplicity of their respective identities; acknowledging that efforts to understand privilege and oppression are often supported and constrained by identities. The authors then present thr...

Using Marilyn Frankenstein's germinal 1983 article " Critical Mathematics Education: An Application of Paulo Freire's Epistemology " and Ole Skovsmose's 1985 germinal article " Mathematics Education Versus Critical Education " as credible " start points " , critical mathematics or more broadly, social justice mathematics, is marking three decades o...

This article describes teachers' collective work aimed at learning to teach mathematics for social justice. Teacher interviews, discussions, lessons, and written reflections were analyzed using grounded theory methodology, and teachers' conversations were examined concerning the relationship between mathematical goals and social justice goals. Anal...

This study examines the ways prospective elementary teachers (PSTs) made connections to children’s mathematical thinking and children’s community funds of knowledge in mathematics lesson plans. We analyzed the work of 70 PSTs from across three university sites associated with an instructional module for elementary mathematics methods courses that a...

This study examined prospective teachers’ (PSTs) ability to recognize evidence of children’s conceptual understanding of mathematics in three content areas before and after an instructional intervention designed to support this ability. It also investigates the role PSTs’ content knowledge plays in their ability to recognize children’s mathematical...

Through this performance ethnography the authors present the stories of emerging scholars who in their research identify an interest in equity issues in the field of mathematics education. The article is based on life-story interviews with 26 participants. Six composite characters were developed to represent the voices of the participants. Particul...

This study examined the life histories of a group of emerging scholars in the field of mathematics education who identify themselves as having a particular interest in and concern for issues of equity and diversity. Experiences of being the "other," "bearing witness" to "othering experiences," and "orienting experiences" in relation to issues of eq...

In this article, the author draws on theories of care to lay out a theoretical map of sorts on what an effective, caring teacher–student relationship that supports student learning might “look like.” In so doing, theories of culturally relevant pedagogy are considered, as these not only illustrate effective practices caring teachers employ but also...

Research repeatedly documents that teachers are underprepared to teach mathematics effectively in diverse classrooms. A critical aspect of learning to be an effective mathematics teacher for diverse learners is developing knowledge, dispositions, and practices that support building on children’s mathematical thinking, as well as their cultural, lin...

A growing number of researchers argue that teaching mathematics for social justice can support the ongoing struggle for equity in mathematics education (Frankenstein, 1995; Gutstein, 2006). One way to support mathematics teachers in developing mathematics pedagogies for social justice may be to use lesson study, a powerful form of professional deve...

In this article, we describe features of learning goals that enable indexing knowledge for teacher education. Learning goals are the key enabler for building a knowledge base for teacher education; they define what counts as essential knowledge for prospective teachers. We argue that 2 characteristics of learning goals support knowledge-building ef...

The publication of Curriculum and Evaluation Standards (NCTM 1989) marked the beginning of a period of significant change in mathematics education. However, that document and many contemporaneous calls for reform lacked a clear focus on equity (Meyer 1989). A decade later, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 2000) began to address...

This paper discusses the entailments of mathematics education research that focuses on cognition and learning, culture and learning, and issues of race and power in mathematics education for understanding and addressing the achievement gap. Research on the achievement gap that provides individual-level accounts of cognitive or social differences be...

This study followed 8 secondary mathematics teachers as they collaboratively designed, implemented, observed, revised and re-taught mathematics lessons for social justice, tracing the conversations teachers had around what it means to teach mathematics for social justice and the challenges that they recognized that they faced in implementing these...